Durbin to visit US military personnel in Ukraine

The Senate’s No. 2 Democrat is in Ukraine to meet with a slew of government officials and U.S. service members who are helping to train the country’s military forces.

“America’s relationship with Ukraine has never been more important,” Senate Minority Whip Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) said Tuesday is a statement.

{mosads}He has already met with Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko, several government ministers and a handful of members from the country’s parliament.

Durbin said the country’s leaders are “focused on key reforms to modernize the economic, security, judicial, and energy sectors — all while fighting the illegal seizure of Ukrainian territory by Russian-backed separatists.”

“We have discussed ongoing Russian violations of the Minsk II cease-fire agreement — including ongoing fighting in disputed areas,” said Durbin, who earlier this year helped launch the Senate Ukraine Caucus in order to strengthen the bond between Washington and Kiev. 

“It’s important that the international community holds President Putin’s regime to account and rejects these threatening Russian actions,” he said.

On Tuesday, Durbin plans to visit 300 U.S. paratroopers who are training Ukrainian forces for the battle against separatist forces.

The soldiers from the 173rd Airborne Brigade out of Vicenza, Italy, are slated to train three groups of around 300 Ukrainian National Guardsmen over the next six months at the International Peacekeeping and Security Center in Yavoriv in western Ukraine.

The U.S. and other Western countries have hit Russia with waves of economic sanctions, accusing Moscow of supporting separatist rebels in eastern Ukraine. Russia has vehemently denied those charges and bristled over Washington’s decision to train Ukrainian troops.

Kiev recently claimed that more than 8,000 people have died in a conflict between their forces and Moscow-backed separatists since the conflict began in April 2014.

On Tuesday Bloomberg reported that U.S. lawmakers who recently visited Ukraine say Moscow is using mobile crematoriums to burn its dead soldiers and thereby cover up its involvement in the conflict.